Fiber-optic Fabry-Perot sensors based on a combination of spatial-frequency division multiplexing and wavelength division multiplexing formed by chirped fiber Bragg grating pairs

Effective multiplexing for a very large number of fiber-optic fiber-Bragg-grating-based Fabry-Perot (FBGFP) sensors is proposed that is based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and spatial-frequency division multiplexing (SFDM). For WDM, FBGFP sensors are arranged in different wavelength domains formed by a series of chirped fiber Bragg gratings with different central wavelengths while the sensors with different cavity lengths within the same wavelength domain are multiplexed by use of SFDM because they have different spatial frequencies as a result of their different cavity lengths. In principle, a thousand FBGFP sensors could be multiplexed with such an approach. The experimental results show that a strain accuracy of better than +/-10 microepsilon has been achieved with little cross talk.